AB

Every single Democratic governor and attorney general needs to do this -- if only to make it clear to voters *right now* that the firings and funding freezes that are about to hurt their states badly are the work of Trump-Musk in Washington.

Get ahead of this now, or get blamed for it later.

Inside you are two bacteria. No, four. Wait, eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Shit, sixty-four. Yikes.

If more Christians in the public eye lived like Jimmy Carter—instead of using faith to advance secular political agendas, bigotry and Christian cultural supremacy—Christianity would have a much better reputation.

And more kids who grow up in the church might actually remain in the faith.

Jimmy Carter was a Christian politician who actually sought to model the teachings of Christ even after leaving politics, rather than using Christianity as a political bludgeon against his opponents or as a tool of supremacy in the godforsaken "culture wars."

i can feel myself slowly morphing into a social democratic george will. complaining about the lack of manners, consideration and due regard for others but from the left

i see this kind of stuff all of the time now and i find it so enraging from a “show some basic social propriety” standpoint.

I'm sure many have said this before but I'm reading a student-facing document about how students might use AI in the classroom (if allowed) and one of the recs is: use AI to make an outline of your reading! But ISN'T MAKING THE OUTLINE how one actually learns?

This is what's so baffling about so many suggestions for AI in the humanities classroom: they mistake the product for the point. Writing outlines and essays is important not because you need to make outlines and essays but because that's how you learn to think with/through complex ideas.

Nobody wants a student essay as a product; we want students to learn to compose their thoughts in written form as a process. I mean, would you have a machine run your laps or play your scales for you? In which case we would not say you had run or played.

No image was more powerful in the '80s than a bunch of TV screens stacked together

One thing I would like to read more about: the doc basically alleges that Trojan went under trying to rerelease everything with string overdubs to get reggae over commercially / juice its catalog one last time, all while second wave/punk were just a couple years away.

YouTube video by Trojan Records Official Dandy Livingstone - Rudy, A Message to You (Official Audio)

To me, this sound is undefeated:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BwN...

Sadly, a few of the subjects of the biggest interviews (Toots Hibbert, Scratch Perry) have died since 2018. Separately, I’m divided on reenactments as a documentary device, but I generally didn’t mind that this one leaned on them.

Watched Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records last night. Great doc. Really filled in some gaps for me about how and why ska and reggae came to be. One thing I really appreciated about it was how narrow its focus was and how willing it was to treat the viewer like an adult and let its subjects talk.

Etymology of the day: before a tapering piece of hanging ice was called an ‘icicle’ it was an ‘ickle’. In the Middle Ages people decided to add ‘ice’ for extra oomph and (tautologically) called it an ‘ice ickle’, until the two words eventually blended together.

Residential neighborhood in a city. Families living on all sides of it. Kids walking past it every day.

the moment i go back in time to warn the romans that crucifying christ is gonna backfire, a fourth cross appears on all visual representations of calvary

A house down the street flies a campaign-branded “Fuck Your Feelings” flag. Still flying weeks after the election.

low key the most egregious condescension is this idea that conservatives do not have agency and are not making choices but are purely reactive and have no mind of their own

Old newspaper article titled "Was most grotesque animal. Stegosaur, who lived in Utah ages ago, is a freak of nature" and there is a drawing of a perfectly normal and valid stegosaurus

This is so rude. He's just a little guy

I know that’s not an original thought, but nothing brings it out like sitting down and hearing the people who lived it in their own words.

I am enjoying most Studs Terkel’s The Good War, an oral history of World War 2. I might refine these thoughts later, but as I read I feel that people around my age (38) watched a rich and nuanced perspective of the war flatten in real time as the generation that fought it became elderly and died.

It’s totally Ellroy’s intent, but a thousand or so pages (and a decade of real time) into the bloody mess the mob/CIA/Oval Office/FBI/paramilitaries/mercenaries made of the world my head is spinning and I want the ride to stop. Plus all the characters think and talk like Ellroy does.

American Tabloid was one of my favorites in high school, and I still love the way it takes a buzzsaw to the Camelot hagiography that is still plaguing us this very week. But now I’m plodding through my 1500th blood-spattered page and on my third or fourth money-laundering novelty cab stand.

Struggling a bit through James Ellroy’s Blood’s A Rover. I reread its prequel American Tabloid on an impulse back in February and decided this year was the year to tackle this book, which has been staring out at me from the bookshelf for years.

It’s like A Moveable Feast, which I just finished, with a less aloof narrator, fewer celebrities and a more granular idea of how the author’s finances work.

For example, he meets a Russian ex-pat waiter who offers him work in a restaurant. Orwell tracks him to a neighborhood even poorer than his is, and when he finally opens his apartment door he finds him unemployed, flat on his injured back and covered in bedbug bites.